Saturday, 15 November, 2008
I finished up my radio recorder today. Its primary purpose in life is to record four hours of WFNX radio content to a CompactFlash card, and so far it seems to work pretty well.
It's built off spare parts and various things I got off eBay. The concept is such that the radio (duct taped to the side) is fed to the line-in on the computer, where it's exported in WAV format (36KHz/16-bit) to a 2GB CompactFlash card that can later be played on my laptop. The entire thing is then connected to a light timer, which turns it on at 6AM and turns it off at 10AM.
For those interested, it runs DOS. I'll have more details soon.
In response to yesterday's post, I went to the supermarket today. While a two-liter bottle is still (for now, at least) $1.64, the price of a twelve-pack has gone up to $5.59. Cans are 355mL each, and 0.355L * 12 = 4.26 liters in a case. At that rate, I could have picked up nearly the same quantity with the convenience store price of $4.58, or six liters for $4.92 at the supermarket.
In other news, the senior class at school had a photo taken yesterday for the yearbook. In the few minutes before the photo was taken, I sketched a quick sign to hold up:
Wednesday, 12 November, 2008
In response to the recent economic downturn, the convenience store down the street from me has increased their price for a two-liter bottle of soda from $1.99 to $2.29. I usually walk in with a $10 bill and buy their fridge's stock of five Mountain Dew bottles; sadly, I can no longer do that.
To the best of my knowledge, the price at the local supermarket is still $1.64. They're extremely rude there, to the point where I'd much rather pay the extra marginal 35 cents to not have to set foot inside. Sixty-five cents, on the other hand, might just force me back there regardless of how many security guards check me for shoplifting each time, or how many cashiers force me to go through their full lines instead of the express lines (with less than twelve items, mind you). A sign of the times, indeed.
Save for the bizarrely declining price of gasoline, what other common items that you buy have gone up in price lately?
Saturday, 08 November, 2008
In retrospect, buying a couple of CD-RWs and DVD-RWs instead of spindles of record-once media would have been a good idea. I'm in the process of getting rid of some twenty CDs worth of outdated Linux distros (Red Hat 6.2 or Mandrake 8.1, anyone?), expired time-demos (to which we can argue that Microsoft is not being environmentally conscious with Longhorn and Longhorn Server builds that expire), and free trials that I no longer have licenses to.
For the time being I'm going to keep them aside. I have a pile of burnt-out fluorescent light bulbs, dead rechargeable batteries, and the like, which I will someday dispose of properly once I collect enough to make a trip to a proper disposal center worth the effort.
If anybody sees something they want, I'd be happy to ship it.
Saturday, 01 November, 2008
Podcast co-host Mark and I yesterday drove out to Rochester, New York to visit our old co-host Jeff at RIT, among other things. That said, we'll probably be recording a show later tonight, for old time's sake. Stay tuned for photos.
Friday, 31 October, 2008
I'm trying out the new Firefox 3.1 betas, and noticed this while reading Antony's blog:
Antony's blog has featured CSS3 drop shadows for quite some time now, and if I'm not mistaken, even Konqueror 2 running on my Mandrake 8 (ca. 2001) machine could render them. Seems like the Mozilla guys only recently implemented this particular functionality of CSS3, which I have to say is pretty long overdue at this point.
In all honesty, I have to wonder if the internal politics of the Mozilla development hierarchy are becoming inefficient now that they've gone commercial...
Tuesday, 28 October, 2008
Yesterday, Antony showed me a Mii version of me, created using the Mii Channel on his Nintendo Wii.
I can't say I've ever seen myself in Mii form, so I'd say this is pretty cool. Thanks!
Monday, 27 October, 2008
I currently have on my left monitor an essay due tomorrow in Language and Composition, and on the right monitor an in-progress Java implementation of the game Mastermind due on Friday. A good way to stimulate both sides of the brain at once, perhaps?
Friday, 24 October, 2008
This is a paragraph of text.
- Ordered list item 1
- Ordered list item 2
Spell check. Spellcheck.
- Unordered list item 1
- Unordered list item 2
Bold Italic Underline Strike Everything
| Table [1][1] | Table [1][2] |
| Table [2][1] | Table [2][2] |
Blockquote.
Test map of One Microsoft Way, Redmond WA.
Test image: believe this.
World: what works and what doesn't?
Wednesday, 22 October, 2008
...contains references to GNU, Mozilla.org, Netscape, NCSA Mosaic, The Great Firewall of China, Comcast, and RealNetworks. Should I scrap it and try harder to not let the "open-source extremist" in me show?